In Pharaoh’s Army: Memories of the Lost War by Tobias Wolff
Knopf; $23 hard
This slender volume may be one of the best Vietnam memoirs
precisely
because almost nothing happens to Tobias Wolff during his year
in-country.
Attached to a South Vietnamese battalion in the Mekong Delta as an
advisor
during 1967-68, Wolff was a lieutenant, supposedly trained as one of
those
quiet killers in the Special Forces. In fact, he had spent his time in
Washington hanging out at George Washington University listening to
Bill
Clinton’s mentor opine about world-historical issues and conducting an
affair
with a distraught Russian emigr�. So when he finally shipped out
to
Vietnam, his commando lessons were far from fresh and his military
aptitude in
general none too sharp. He did have the advantage of fluency in
Vietnamese.
Since Wolff is an accomplished memoirist – he was covered with
hosannas
forThis Boy’s Life, his account of growing up with a daffy
mother in
postwar America – he is able to make wonderful hay out of his story’s
uneventfulness. He has mastered the task, never easy, of extracting
from the
jumble of his experience precisely the incidents and details to nail
his own
foibles. Or rather, he describes the foibles of the man he was 20-odd
years
ago. Most delightful is his relationship to one Sgt. Benet, a black
soldier who
plays taciturn Sancho Panza to Wolff’s jittery Quixote and is convinced
there
is a land mine with his name on it around every bend. The account that
opens
the book, of Wolff and Benet’s raid on the American base at Dong Tam to
secure
a color television – so they can watch the Bonanza Thanksgiving episode
–
really should stand as a classic vignette of the war.
Otherwise, Wolff avoids getting 86’d at the beginning of the 1968
Tet
offensive because he’s lounging around in his cot, avoids being
squashed by a
helicopter thanks mainly to dumb luck, encounters a hard-boiled
Canadian doctor
who thinks war is the great educator of our species, and is tricked
into eating
a dog. He effects a touching rapprochement with his con-man father
(whose life
is described in brother Geoffrey’s fine The Duke of Deception).
And like
everyone who goes to war, he loses a friend of the type for which
you would
unhesitatingly sacrifice a body part. Wolff crowns his elegantly
structured
tale with an incident that goes to the core of what Vietnam meant to
him. It
involves an idiotic captain, a Chinook helicopter, and a few flimsy
structures
that some indigenous personnel called home. Your basic Chinook, it
turns out,
created a mighty fierce backwash.
Despite the everyday absurdity Wolff recounts, there is finally
no removing
the romance from war, as the great Vietnam War photographer Tim Page
insisted
to Michael Herr, laughing from under a skull full of steel plating. And
while
there is no way In Pharaoh’s Army could become bloody celluloid,
the
intrinsic, violent glamour of war keeps Americans from coming to grips
with the
lost war. Books like this reach a tiny number of people compared to
movies like
The Walking Dead, which are seen by millions of video and cable
consumers even when they flop. They all hammer the same point,
historically
false yet seemingly irresistible: We could have won if the
politicians/generals/peacenik scum would have let us. No, this book
tacitly,
quietly says, the war effort was a farce, the sacrifice pointless.
This article appears in April 28 • 1995 and April 28 • 1995 (Cover).